We’ve all dreamed at one time or other of ‘following our bliss’.  Some of us are actually lucky enough to be able to do it.  But zeroing in on our bliss and then following it is often a messy process requiring planning, delays, and unexpected detours and delights along the way.

For Mary Beth Murphy, finding her bliss started with a tragedy, but wound its way through delights, detours and uncertainties, before finding its way to Piche, the company she founded that imports estate grown French olive oils. 

Imagine for a moment you’re in southern France.  Visualize picturesque villages with their weekly markets filled with delectable, ready-to-eat-now produce in rich colors of juicy red, deep green and the intense purples of beet and aubergine.  Fields of smiling golden sunflowers.  Terraces of sunlight dappled trees, their silvery green leaves laden with small green olives.  A be-linened table covered with platters of olive oil drizzled tomatoes, cheese, bread and a bottle of wine...imagine capturing that experience in an olive oil bottle...

But, I’m getting ahead of my story.

At 5:30 a.m. on September 11, 2009, Mary Beth Murphy was in Los Angeles getting dressed and prepped for a morning business meeting just as she had for countless other similar meetings over the years. It was a special day, her birthday, and she was planning on giving herself the present of making the meeting and then hopping a plane to head home for a birthday celebration.  

Her attention was suddenly riveted by the unfolding tragic events playing out before her eyes on the other side of the country.  Mary Beth’s work selling investments to brokerage firms took her frequently to New York and she couldn’t begin to count the number of times she had been in the towers of the World Trade Center.  She LOVED New York City.  

Stuck in LA, unable to get home, Mary Beth couldn’t stop thinking, “Those people were going to work just like me...if this were the last day of my life I would not want to spend it doing this, with these people.  What am I doing?”

Her job selling investments was high energy, sexy, all consuming, and she was good at it. But, once the question “What am I doing?” popped out of the Pandora’s Box of her mind, she simply couldn’t get it back in the box.  Within a few months, she quit her job.

But, she wondered, what now?  

Mary Beth remembered a story in The New Yorker that had captured her imagination.  A couple went to the Provencal region of France where the wife attended cooking school and the husband simply read books.  Mary Beth had always been interested in food and was delighted to find that Georgeanne Brennan, her favorite cookbook author, had a cooking school in Provence. Off went Mary Beth and Ralph, her husband, for what would turn out to be a life changing month in southern France.

Mary Beth recalls, “A whole new world and way to live opened up. The French don’t have three TVs, or three cars, or huge homes, but they have a wonderful quality of life.  Every day we were there, we went to the market, bought beautiful, wonderful food, went back, cooked it, and talked about it.”    

At one point on the trip, Mary Beth and Ralph went to an olive oil tasting. It was a revelation.  “I didn’t know olive oil could be anything but oily.  But, olive oils are very much like wine.  There isn’t a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but the experience depends on what you are eating with it.  Knowing how flavors are likely to work with each other is the difference between decent and ‘Wow’!”  Mary Beth and Ralph eagerly packed as many bottles in their suitcases as they could and then gave them away to a score of lucky friends before realizing, too late, they could not buy those oils in this country.  

Oops.

While France and its olive oils had made a deep impression, Mary Beth still wasn’t sure what to do with the experience.  So, she returned to work, but spent the next few years conceiving an idea to start a business importing the olive oils she loved.  When news came one day that the company where she worked was being sold, she was elated, and ready.    

Well, not quite.

Mary Beth laughs ruefully to recall, “I embarked on a trail that was daunting.  I mean, if I’d really known what was in front of me...well, it was just best not to know.”  She loved olive oil, food, the whole sensory experience of it.  But getting the backend pieces in place to make a business out of it was a difficult undertaking, to say the least.